Chương 10: Saying Goodbye

Enzo tucked the spellbook into his backpack and surveyed the workshop one last time. The backpack was already heavy. His tool roll sat at the bottom, the custom leather wrap holding every graver, file, burnisher, and setting tool he kept at home. Above it, the contents of the safe. Casting grain in labeled containers, gold and silver wire in various gauges, sheet stock, and a tray of loose gemstones separated by type. Rough and cut alike.

Anything that had been set into a finished piece came too, because the metal and stones could be reclaimed if needed. He slung the pack over one shoulder and let his gaze settle on the far wall. The faceting machine. The polishing motor. The centrifugal caster. The kiln. All dead weight without electricity, and too heavy to carry even if they weren't. He was going to need a way to replace them. A hand-crank faceting machine at minimum, something jewelers used before electrification.

He might need to find an antique store. Or a museum. He closed the workshop door behind him and found Val and Sumi in the kitchen, working quietly. Cupboards stood open. The counter held two cardboard boxes, one half full of dried goods, canned food, and bottled water. Sumi was wrapping a bag of rice in a plastic grocery bag while Val sorted through what remained.

"We're leaving whatever we can't easily carry," Val said without looking up.

"We'll grab supplies from the grocery store when we pick up the bikes."

"Good thinking." Val straightened and blew hair out of her face.

"We should leave some of this for Mrs. Okita. She doesn't have anyone else." The thought had already crossed his mind. He nodded. They finished packing in ten minutes. Val and Sumi's bags held clothes, first aid supplies, and a little food and water. Just in case anything went wrong with the grocery plan. It hadn't been difficult to convince them that he needed to bring his crafting tools and supplies. Not with the shield ring resting on Val's finger.

Murph sat by the door, watching them with the intensity of a dog who understood that bags meant going somewhere, her tail and butt wagging in place. Enzo stood in the living room for a moment. The couch where he'd slept for months. His record player in the corner, the vinyl collection beside it, reorganized by his sister into something functional. The view through the window of blood-stained streets and a sky that was finally, mercifully, clearing. He wondered if they'd ever come back.

"You okay?" Val asked from the hallway.

"Yeah." He adjusted the backpack.

"Just saying goodbye to my vinyl collection."

"Tragic."

"You don't understand. Some of those are first pressings."

"We can come back for them, Ren." He appreciated the lie. Enzo stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him.

"Lock." The mechanism clicked. He stared at the door for a second longer, then turned away. They carried the boxes of food down to the first floor. Val knocked on Mrs. Okita's door. No response. Val knocked again.

"Mrs. Okita? It's Valentina." Silence. Murph sniffed at the gap beneath the door, then sat down and looked up at Enzo. He glanced at Val. She met his eyes, and he saw the same thought forming. He tried the handle. The door opened. The apartment was small and warm and smelled of stale air and something floral. Lavender, maybe. A hallway leading to a living room where curtains filtered the light into a golden haze. Everything was tidy, arranged with the kind of care that came from decades of living in the same space.

Photographs lined the wall. A younger Mrs. Okita in a garden, smiling beside a man who must have been her husband. She was in her recliner. Her eyes were closed. Her hands rested in her lap, fingers loosely curled. An old paperback novel lay on the carpet at the foot of the chair where it had slipped from her grip. On the small table beside her, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits, one half-eaten. The tea was long cold. She looked as if she'd fallen asleep reading. Ordinary.

A respite from the world they now found themselves in. Sumi made a small sound behind him. Val's hands tightened around the box she carried. Enzo stood there, looking at the woman who used to ask him how Valentina was doing every time he passed her door. He didn't know if she'd been a mage. Most people weren't. One in a hundred and fifty, Val had said. And he didn't think she'd been exposed to the rain. The odds were overwhelmingly in favor of her being mundane, which meant she would simply stay where she was.

But he thought about the building's entrance door, the one that didn't always close properly. Thought about someone else eventually coming in, finding her, not knowing to check. Or worse, not finding her until it was too late. If she had been a mage, her body would reanimate. And without knowing which gene she might have carried, he couldn't know if it was the heart or the brain that needed to be destroyed. Which meant both. The silence in the apartment was thick enough to feel.

Sumi and Val stood in the doorway behind him. Neither left. Neither looked away. Enzo stepped forward slowly. He knelt beside the recliner, his knee protesting with a spike of pain under the added weight of his backpack. Up close, she looked even more peaceful. Just sleeping. Just an old woman who'd had her tea and read her book and drifted off. He checked her pulse. Knew immediately that he wouldn't find one. Then he placed his palm over her heart. Closed his eyes.

Drew mana from his reserves and shaped it by hand, threading the Spear with the same care he used for engraving. Controlled. Measured. Just far enough and no further. The spell passed through cleanly. He held it for a moment, then released it. He moved his hand to her temple. Rested his fingertips against the thin skin there. The mana came slower this time, as if his own reserves understood what he was asking them to do. He shaped the second Spear with the same care, the same restraint. It was over in seconds.

Enzo pulled his hand away and opened his eyes. She looked the same. That was the worst part. A notification pulsed at the edge of his awareness. — Spear (Level 3) → Spear (Level 4) — He stared at it. Then dismissed it with annoyance. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Val and Sumi placed the boxes of food on the kitchen counter. It was a pointless gesture now, but neither of them seemed willing to take them back. Enzo understood.

Carrying the food out would mean admitting they'd brought it for nothing. They closed her door on the way out. Enzo locked it the same way he'd locked his own apartment. The building's front entrance opened onto a midday that looked nothing like the one three days ago. It had been a day since the rain stopped, and the sky above was pale blue streaked with thin clouds. The first clear sky since the blood started falling. Below it, the streets told a different story.

Blood had dried in layers across every surface, dark and cracking where it had pooled thickest, staining the pavement and walls and cars in shades of rust and black. The air smelled different. The penny-and-raw-steak tang of the first day had faded, replaced by something drier. Earthier. Underneath it, a sharpness that prickled at his mana sense even without activating it. Murph pressed against his leg, nose working.

"This way," Enzo said.

"My store's a few blocks up on the avenue." They started walking. The streets were still bad, even though the flooding had receded as the rain stopped. People were adapting. Slowly, and with the grim focus of survivors rather than the panic of the first day. Cars still sat abandoned, and storefronts were shuttered or barricaded. But there were plenty of signs of activity. A hardware store with its front door propped open, voices inside.

A second-floor window where someone had hung a bedsheet painted with a red cross. Roaming groups of people armed with makeshift weapons. Enzo worried for a moment how that might turn out, as the four of them approached a group of six. But the other group crossed the road before they met. The backpack's weight settled into a rhythm against his shoulders, each step sending a familiar reminder through his knee. Val held Murph's lead in one hand. Sumi walked between them, head on a swivel.

They'd made it two blocks when Murph froze. Her whole body went rigid, weight dropping low, ears flat. A growl rose from somewhere deep in her chest, low and sustained, pointed at the gutted storefront ahead of them like an accusation. Enzo stopped. Val and Sumi followed his lead. For a moment, nothing happened. Then two figures spilled out of the doorway. The first broke into an immediate sprint toward them, purple eyes blazing, arms loose and gait wrong.

The second hung back in the shadow of the entrance, head twitching, the telltale shimmer building around its temples. Enzo dealt with the second one first. He leaned his weight into the cane, raising his right hand with the index and middle fingers extended.

"Bolt. Bolt." Two shots. Both aimed at the head. The first projectile struck it between the eyes. The second hit the doorframe as the thing crumpled sideways, the shimmer dying before the body settled. Wasted. The other Eater was still coming. Sumi stepped up beside him, planted her feet, and extended her arm.

"Bolt." The shot caught it in the shoulder. The impact spun it half around and sent it stumbling sideways, but it found its footing and kept charging. Sumi's eyes went wide. Murph barked once. Sharp and furious. Then she lunged forward, ripping the lead from Val's grip before anyone could react.

"Murph! No!" The border collie closed the distance in three bounding strides and launched herself at the Eater's legs. Her jaws clamped down on its calf and her weight hit it broadside. The thing's legs tangled and it went down hard, face cracking against the pavement. Murph didn't let go. She braced her legs and shook, dragging the thrashing Eater across the ground, her growl muffled by the mouthful of leg. Sumi's hand was up but wavering.

"I can't get a clean shot. I don't want to hit Murph." Val was already moving. She closed the gap in two strides and drove her boot down between the Eater's shoulder blades, pinning its chest flat against the ground.

"Burst Step." The detonation punched through its back and into the pavement beneath. The Eater went limp. Silence. Except for Murph, still growling, still gripping the dead thing's leg. Enzo's voice cut through the chaos.

"Murph. Heel." Her jaw opened. She released the leg, turned, and trotted to his side. Sat down beside his cane and looked up at him, tongue lolling from a muzzle streaked with dark blood. Her tail swept the ground excitedly. He blinked down at the dog, confused. He'd expected her to respond, but only after giving the command a few more times. Her training was still very much a work in progress. The look in Murph's eyes gave him pause. Intelligent. Patient. He frowned.

It wasn't just her size that had changed after surviving the rain. And her response to the Eater's mere existence wasn't lost on him, either. He recalled his own feelings when he came face to face with the first one. As if the creatures stood for everything he hated. Anathema. He reached down and patted her on the head, remembering to reinforce the correct behavior.

"Good girl, Murph." Val retrieved the lead and wrapped it twice around her fist this time. Murph accepted it without protest, falling back into position ahead of the group as if nothing had happened. Sumi fell into step beside Enzo as they continued north. She was quiet for half a block before speaking.

"Bolt is harder than it looks."

"You hit a moving target on your first try. That's good."

"I hit its shoulder. Center mass was right there and I still missed it." She flexed her fingers, studying her own hand as if it had betrayed her.

"How do you make it look so easy?" He thought about it.

"Honestly? I was convinced I'd need target practice after my first fight. Missed my first shot completely, because I tried to palm-shoot." He shrugged.

"Turns out if they're standing still or running straight at me, it's manageable with pointed fingers. Anything else and I'm guessing too."

"That's not reassuring."

"You'll figure it out. The magic responds to your intent, and intent gets sharper with practice." She looked unconvinced, but nodded. The commercial strip came into view at the end of the block. A stretch of small storefronts running east-west, the kind of neighborhood avenue where you could buy a loaf of bread, get a bike tuned, and browse handmade jewelry within a few hundred feet. It had not survived the last three days intact.

Several storefronts had their windows smashed in, glass scattered across the sidewalk in glittering piles amid the dried blood. A clothing boutique had been emptied, hangers strewn across the floor inside. The pharmacy two doors down was worse, the security gate bent inward and shelves visible through the gap, stripped bare. His store sat in the middle of the block. The sign above the door still read Locke & Stone in the typeface he'd spent far too long choosing.

Below it, both display windows had been shattered, the glass cases inside overturned and emptied. Pieces he'd spent weeks crafting, scattered or gone. The careful lighting he'd installed to showcase the work, dead and pointless. He wondered if his insurance covered apocalyptic events. Probably not. There was almost certainly an act of God clause, and this qualified on a technicality even if the responsible parties were star-eating monsters instead of divine. It didn't matter.

The display pieces were beautiful, but they were also complete works. Revenue he'd never collect. What he actually needed was in the office safe, untouched and irreplaceable. Raw stock, specialty tools, and the pieces still in progress that hadn't made it to the floor yet. The bike shop was two doors down, its storefront intact behind a metal security shutter. A small grocery store anchored the far end of the block, door propped open with a cinder block.

"Sumi, Val. Hit the grocery store. Water, anything lightweight and calorie-dense. Protein bars, dried fruit, nuts, jerky. Enough for three days." He looked at Murph.

"And dog food. Grab the premium high protein stuff."

"What about you?" Val asked, gesturing at the wreckage of the store.

"I need to grab what's left from my store. The safe in the office should be fine." Val studied him for a moment, then nodded.

"Meet at the bike shop?"

"Yeah. Be safe." She handed Murph's lead to Sumi and crossed the road. Sumi followed, Murph trotting between them. Enzo turned toward Locke & Stone and stepped through the doorway. The showroom was gutted. Glass crunched with every step, shards from the display cases mixing with fragments of the front windows across the tile floor. The cases themselves had been tipped and dragged, some shattered entirely, others just emptied. Velvet display busts lay scattered among the debris, stripped of everything they'd held.

Necklaces, bracelets, rings. Years of work, gone in what had probably been minutes. Sunlight cut through the broken windows and lit the destruction in sharp detail. He could see where the looters had been thorough and where they'd been hasty. A pendant glinted under an overturned case, missed in the rush. A loose sapphire caught the light near the baseboard. He left them where they were. The showroom had always been the public face of his work.

Clean lines, warm lighting, each piece displayed to catch the eye and hold it. He'd designed the layout himself, spent days adjusting the position of every case and spotlight until the space felt right. Now it looked like every other ransacked storefront on the block. Enzo stood in the middle of the room and let himself feel it. Not the loss of the pieces or their monetary value. The loss of what it represented.

A place he'd rebuilt from nothing after Gramp's passing, shaped by the same patience and attention he brought to the work itself. The first thing in his life after the accident that had been entirely his own. He took a breath. Let it go. He crossed the showroom, weaving through the wreckage, and reached for the handle of the back door. Then stopped. Something moved on the other side. A scrape of weight shifting across the floor, followed by silence. Enzo's hand hovered over the handle.

His other tightened around the cane. He pulled open the door.